Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-10-2006
Abstract
Antitrust law is a blunt instrument for dealing with many claims of anticompetitive standard setting. Antitrust fact finders lack the sophistication to pass judgment on the substantive merits of a standard. In any event, antitrust is not a roving mandate to question bad standards. It requires an injury to competition, and whether the minimum conditions for competitive harm are present can often be determined without examining the substance of the standard itself.
When government involvement in standard setting is substantial antitrust challenges should generally be rejected. The petitioning process in a democratic system protects even bad legislative judgments from collateral attack. In any event, antitrust's purpose is to correct private markets. It is not a general corrective for political processes that have gone awry. The best case for antitrust liability occurs when the government has somehow been deceived into adopting a standard that it would not have adopted had it known the true facts. Even then, nonantitrust remedies such as equitable estoppel are probably a superior solution.
Keywords
Antitrust, Competition, Standard Setting, Technology, Networks, Exclusion, Collusion, Regulation
Repository Citation
Hovenkamp, Herbert J., "Standards Ownership and Competition Policy" (2006). All Faculty Scholarship. 1914.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1914
Included in
Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons